Water mill - horizontal-wheeled, Arkeen Beg, Co. Galway

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Water mill – horizontal-wheeled, Arkeen Beg, Co. Galway

At the northern edge of Arkeen Beg Lough in County Galway, a small stream carries water away from the lake and, in doing so, passes through the remains of a milling complex that most people would walk past without a second glance.

What survives is modest and fragmentary, but the arrangement tells a coherent story: two mill-dams, one upstream and one downstream, bracketing a pair of buildings on opposite banks, the whole system organised around the controlled movement of water.

The main mill building is a drystone-built rectangle measuring roughly 8.4 metres by 4.9 metres, sitting on the southern bank of the stream. Drystone construction, which uses no mortar, was the standard method for agricultural and industrial buildings in the rural west, and it gives these walls their rough, stacked character. A water chute, the channel that directed flow onto the mill mechanism, is still identifiable. The mill would have been of the horizontal-wheeled type, sometimes called a click mill or Norse mill, in which a horizontal paddle wheel sits directly beneath the millstone and is driven by a jet of water rather than the more familiar vertical wheel of lowland mills. Horizontal mills were widespread across the west of Ireland and required less water engineering than their vertical counterparts. On the northern bank stands a later annexe, larger at nearly 12 metres by just over 4 metres, with two rectangular recesses cut into its north wall, the purpose of which is not recorded but which may have served as storage niches or structural supports for fittings now long gone.

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Pete F
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